- As you both know, many Americans believe
that this election is the most important in their lives.
Certainly in your columns, you have discussed
why the election is critical for our democracy.
Please share a bit more about your views
on the upcoming election.
And Bret, maybe you can go first.
- President McCartney, thank you for having us this evening,
and thanks for the Smith community for joining us.
I think Gail feels this way as well,
that we both feel this is the most important election
in American history for, I don't know,
at least a hundred years.
It's hard to think of one as important,
not because of the policies at stake,
but in my view, because democracy itself is at stake.
That is to say, is the system of liberal democracy
in which elections take place,
in ways where the rules are universally agreed,
and the outcome is generally considered legitimate.
Is that going to survive November 3rd?
I think for once, it's a real question
whether or not it will.
And I think it's also critical because we wanna know
whether what happened in 2016 was sort of an accident,
a fluke, or whether it has set the United States,
and if I may say, particularly the conservative movement
in the United States, on a course that is antithetical
to the liberal democratic values
that most mainstream Republicans
and mainstream Democrats
traditionally shared, including respect for a free press,
respect for the rights of dissents and protest,
a belief in baseline ideals
about equality and opportunity,
whether that is going to survive or not.
So, part of the problem that I think
Gail and I have encountered in the last few years
of our conversation, and I know she'll agree with me,
is that, you know, we're supposed to disagree
more than we do, but those disagreements
that we do have seem trivial next to
the larger area of concern and agreement
about whether this ship that we're on,
the U.S.S. America, is going to sail or sink.
And so that's why I think the election
is just so extraordinarily important.
- Gail, what would you like to say?
- I agree with every single word Bret says, as always.
- Oh no!
- It's really hard on me, but if Joe Biden wins,
we can have all these normal fights about health care,
and tax policy, and stuff like that.
But the whole time that we've been together,
really we've been finding ourselves theoretically arguing
but really agree because we are both
still appalled at what's happening
to the political community with Donald Trump.
And when I go out into the world,
I find that the people I see there
just sort of really relate to the idea
that we get along so well.
And they all tell me to say, "Hi," to Bret, wherever I go.
And even if they're real left groups somewhere
and they, it's a feeling that so much of the country
has this desperate feeling of,
"Oh my God, let's get back to the normal thing
and go on."
But there's certainly enough people around
who don't feel that way, and I truly think
that it's an adjustment to the whole world of the web
that's doing all this, that we're just
having to rearrange our democracy a little bit
to accommodate the fact that now everybody can communicate
so many different ways.
So it's a scary time.
It can be an exciting time.
And I sure as heck hope we can get the election
taken care of without any disasters next month.
- If there is not a decisive outcome in November,
whether it's on the night of November 3rd,
hopefully the night of November 3rd,
but when the votes are counted, the margins are wide.
If that doesn't happen,
I think we're going to be in trouble,
and one of the ways in which I simply find myself
unable to reconcile myself to the Trump presidency,
and I say this as someone who's always identified
as being politically on the right,
is that he has done so much
to damage our cultural ethical faith
in the essential fairness and soundness of the system.
And he started doing that from before
his first election last time,
and has done it all the way up into the present.
Basically claiming that any vote
that doesn't have him as the winner
is going to be an illegitimate vote.
And that's a scary place to be, where you don't feel
like both sides are playing by the same set of rules.
- I was just writing is, before we came on here,
about third parties, and I'm trying to beg everyone
in America, "Don't vote for a third party.
"Ignore the third parties."
I can understand why people like the idea of third parties,
but it always screws things up,
because what happens is that nobody then gets a majority,
things get knocked off one way or another
by a very small number of votes.
And this election in particular, you can not,
I mean, when I was in college,
I remember writing in, Eldridge Cleaver,
or somebody for president, because I thought,
"What the hell, they're all wrong anyway,"
but it's not like that now.
We have to make sure we really do this the right way.
- I mean, Trump is a unique challenge for the media,
because on the one hand,
he's so consistently transgressive
that it's very hard not to report on everything
he says and does, right?
On the other hand, there is a tactic,
witting or unwitting.
I suspect it's witting,
keeping to my eighth grade bully analogy,
which is simply to bait his detractors
to the point that this line isn't original to me,
but he's like the car alarm that keeps sounding, right?
That after a while, at first it's annoying,
and then you just, you just tune it out.
And so, he has managed to anesthetize,
I think a lot of the public
to behavior that would have been scandalous
in a previous presidency, and at the same time,
make many of us in the media,
whose job it is to say, "Check this out,
"look what the president just said,"
to make us seem like, I dunno, like moral ninnies,
like, you know, constantly enraged by what he's doing.
And I don't know if there's any pat answer
to how the media should have responded
to the challenge of Trump.
Although, I sometimes feel that we are
too easily baited by him,
that we play his game too frequently,
that we, whenever we make mistakes,
and we do because we're a human institution,
and we are like any other institution,
we provide him with openings
that he doesn't necessarily deserve.
And I do not envy the job of like our colleague,
Dean Baquet or Marty Baron at The Washington Post,
or Matt Murray at The Wall Street Journal.
Because for any of them, it's a really impossible challenge
to cover a president who is trying
to make the media an ally, not an ally exactly,
but a partner in his debasement of common values.
So, I'm hard pressed to say.
There are times when I sort of,
I pull out my hair and think,
"Gee, you know, there are occasions when the media
"could be a little more gracious,
"simply to deny him the opportunity to say,
"'You guys are all fake news.
"'You're all out to get me.'"
I wrote a nice column about Trump today
because he helped midwife this peace
in the Middle East, right?
And people said,
"How dare you say something nice about Trump."
But I do feel like it lends more credibility
to my case when I then go ahead and criticize him,
because it doesn't make me seem like I have,
you know, what Trump supporters call
Trump derangement syndrome.
I'm capable of saying something nice from time to time,
and that may be a better strategy.
But anyway, I've gone on for too long.
- That's great.
Gail, was the media complicit in 2016?
- No, not at all.
No, we have a problem.
We had it then and we have it now,
in that it's hard to deal with a guy
who makes stuff up all the time,
because this fact that he is lying about things
is not a story anymore,
because he does it 27,000 times in a day.
It just, it exhausts you in that way,
so you have to find new ways to come at it.
And I think more and more
that we've gotta look back at the voters.
We've gotta talk to the voters
about their own voting things,
their own state and local people,
people thinking about voting in terms,
not just destroying Donald Trump,
but of all the other people
who maybe should be encouraged to be in politics
or maybe shouldn't, or maybe should at least be made to feel
that they're being watched once in awhile,
because I swear to you, a lot of these right now,
so many of the legislators feel like
they can do anything as long as they don't cross
those little tiny boundaries between the two sides
and do something to irritate their own face,
and that otherwise they can just go home
and go to sleep all day.
'Cause it's, it's sort of lost track of the real government.
- So, I was just looking at the Q&A function.
And the first question was,
"Why give Bret Stephens, a person whose political values
"go against those of Smith College, a platform?"
And I think that's a totally fair question,
and I'm glad that someone asked it.
And what I hope, if that person is still watching,
is that maybe my political values aren't quite as obnoxious
as that person might have imagined in the first place.
But more importantly,
we have a real problem in America
listening to one another, and we're,
I'm paid to talk, Gail's paid to talk,
and we all wanna be talkers.
But I mean, my wife, who's a music critic,
and is a lot wiser than I am.
She's in the business of listening.
And I think we could find a way of moving as a country
from being a country of nonstop talkers
to being a country of more attentive,
careful, and empathetic listeners.
And if we do that, there's some chance
that we will be surprised,
that things are not what we think,
that our political opponents are not as terrible
as we suppose they are.
And that even if they are,
there is some value in just listening to them.
At least, you know who your enemy is.
That's something that's sort of been lost.
And you know, you have a session.
It's a great honor to be included in this.
And here you, you know, here we are talking,
and talking, and talking.
One day, I would love for an opportunity to, you know,
to come up to North Hampton and just spend more time
listening to what people, what's on people's minds.
- This is a terrible time.
It's so important that everybody being mobilized,
and be on guard, and work hard,
but you should also try to enjoy yourself.
The whole process of democracy is really enjoyable.
It's about talkin' with other people,
finding new things to do,
and I think some adventures out in the world.
And I would just urge everybody to get involved
and don't think of it as something
in which you have to be angry and martyred all the time.
Try to find ways to have a good time doing political stuff,
organizing things, and talking to other people about issues.